Elon Musk cancelled a pre-poll meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on feeble grounds and went on a business call to China instead. In doing so, he displayed intuition (aided by AI?) that eluded the domestic pollsters about outcomes in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. In the end, the pollsters ate humble pie as the BJP struggled to a total of 240 seats out of 543, 32 short of a simple majority, and far below its 2019 level of 303 seats.
Even in Varanasi, the Prime Minister’s adopted constituency, the win margin (difference between the votes of the winner and the next best candidate) was 1,52,513 (about 25 per cent). Observers were quick to point out that just 242 km to the west in the heart of Awadh, in Rae Bareli, a family bastion passed on by Sonia Gandhi to Rahul Gandhi in this election, the win margin was 57 per cent. “Pappu”, as the ruling alliance sometimes derisively refers to Rahul Gandhi, seems to have come a long way.
The 2024 Lok Sabha elections unleashed two tremors for the BJP. The first was the shock that the BJP is not “atma nirbhar” for survival. With just 240 seats versus the 272 needed to form a government, it now desperately needs the alliance partners -- principally the 16 Telugu Desam Party seats in Andhra Pradesh and 12 JD-U seats in Bihar -- to survive with a wafer-thin majority. This elevates the political profiles of both Nara Chandrababu Naidu and Nitesh Kumar within the NDA to “white knights” from their earlier status as junior alliance partners. The allocation of Union Cabinet portfolios will reflect this. If the BJP is to retain the core sovereign portfolios of finance, home, external affairs and defence, it will have to give up other key portfolios -- Power, petroleum and natural gas, coal and mines, IT, urban affairs and housing or railways. This will dissolve the existing close-knit, intra-party, walled pattern of functioning, with the Prime Minister’s Office being the dominant driving force via a direct connect with top civil servants in the ministries.
The second tremor was the structural shift in electoral preferences across states. The biggest shock was the tidal wave of support in Uttar Pradesh for the Samajwadi Party, an INDIA alliance partner, which won 37 of the 80 seats, with the BJP left with 33. The Congress was a distant third with eight seats but the INDIA alliance, with 47 seats, won more than 50 per cent of the seats.
Similarly unsettling were the West Bengal results, where Mamata Bannerjee’s Trinamul Congress swept the polls, with 29 of the 42 seats. The BJP was a distant second with 12 seats, whilst the Congress was reduced to just one seat. Rajasthan, where the BJP recently came to power in the Assembly polls, chose to play truant in the Lok Sabha elections and returned eight Congress seats, though with 14 out of 25 seats the BJP retained its electoral dominance. Haryana also chose to divide the 10 seats evenly between the BJP and the Congress. In Bihar, whilst the NDA remained dominant with Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) polling 12 seats, the same as the BJP, the balance of power shifts away from the BJP. In Maharashtra, attempting to cannibalise its alliance partner the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray) has not helped. The BJP got just nine of the 48 seats, its NDA alliance partners Shiv Sena (Shinde) got seven seats and the NCP (of Ajit Pawar) one seat. In comparison, the Congress got the largest number of seats (13) and together with its INDIA alliance partners -- Sharad Pawar NCP (8) and the Uddhav Thackrey Shiv Sena (9) -- a majority of 30 out of 48 seats.
It is unwise, however, to assume that the BJP’s vote bank has dissipated. It won all 29 seats in Madhya Pradesh and 25 out of 26 seats in Gujarat. In the hill states of North India, the BJP is well entrenched. Himachal Pradesh, which recently elected a Congress government in the Assembly elections, kept its options open by giving a five out of five victory for the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections. In Uttarakhand, the five out of five win was unexceptional since the recent Assembly elections were also won by the BJP.
The BJP won all seven seats in Delhi, decimating the Congress and AAP. More importantly, the BJP’s foray into the South continues unabated. In Karnataka, the BJP won 17 of the 28 seats. In Telangana, it won eight of the 17 seats, drawing level with the Congress.
The Assembly elections, held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls, reflected continuity in Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim. But change was the leitmotif in the two larger states. In Odisha, the BJP triumphed by ejecting chief minister Naveen Patnaik, son of the legendary World War II pilot Biju Patnaik, who was chief minister (1961-63) in a Congress government. The Biju Janata Dal (BJD), in power since 2000, was ripe for a drubbing after nearly a quarter century of decent but somnolent rule by Naveen Patnaik, who unbelievably, drafted a civil servant turned politician to manage the 2024 election. That the Indian political class and the electorate prefers a red line between the bureaucracy and politicians was amply displayed by the results. The BJP, with 78 seats, swept past the 73 seats needed for a majority. The BJD was reduced to 51 seats. The Congress came in third, with 14 seats.
In the Andhra Pradesh Assembly polls, Nara Chandrababu Naidu, the original Andhra economic reformer, early digital governance aficionado of the 2000s, and the architect of the new bifurcated Andhra Pradesh in 2014, with its brand-new capital city at Amravati, struck a century with his Telugu Desam Party winning 135 of the 175 seats, leaving the earlier ruling YSR Congress with just 11 seats. Significantly, BJP came in third with eight seats, continuing to consolidate support across all five states in the South.
Management experts believe that in mergers, getting the senior executives to realign expectations is the most difficult part. This becomes worse in coalition politics, where oddballs cannot just be booted out. Cabinet colleagues, especially if they hold substantive portfolios, and alliance partners must be cajoled and negotiated with, not bludgeoned, or ignored into submission. Can Prime Minister Modi shed the President Xi style of “remote, unyielding supreme leadership” projected by him, retrieve his earlier collaborative inner self, and use his expertise at shaping political trends to ensure stability? The survival of the new NDA government is hostage to his personal transformation.
